Phoronix

A new version of libdrm is available today, the library that sits between the kernel Direct Rendering Manager and the user-space clients like Mesa and others. This libdrm 2.4.82 release is a bit more notable than some of the other point releases as it does have some interesting additions...

It was coming down to the wire for the new AMD Zen scheduler model in LLVM 5.0 but now it's managed to land just hours before the LLVM 5.0 branching...

The GnuPG project has announced libgcrypt version 1.8 as the newest version of this Gcrypt library...

Raptor Engineering who does Coreboot development work and is known for their previous Talos Secure Workstation system to provide a fast and fully libre workstation is going to be launching a new POWER-based workstation...

Georges Stavracas' latest work on GNOME is the new WiFi panel for the GNOME Settings area...

GNOME's Mutter has flipped on its new "Monitor Configuration Manager" by default as it seeks to improve the multi-monitor and multi-GPU experience...

For fans of the MPlayer/mplayer2-based MPV media player, version 0.26 was released with a few months worth of improvements...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have continued landing support for the new extensions introduced by Vulkan 1.0.54...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat has been developing a "server-side GLVND" implementation to allow multiple OpenGL driver stacks to co-exist within the X.Org Server space...

Tomorrow is the feature freeze / branching deadline for LLVM 5.0 and as of writing the new AMD Zen scheduler model hasn't been merged, but it looks like it could still happen in time...

I've just finished out a round of tests using the Linux 4.13-rc1 kernel with its new AMDGPU driver code. No regressions with my Polaris and Fiji tests, but at the same time no performance gains trickled through when running various tests with RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL from Mesa 17.2-dev...

Since last year NVIDIA has been working on HDR support for the Linux desktop. They've worked on support for their driver, but with the Linux infrastructure for High Dynamic Range monitors lacking, they've been working on lower-level Linux improvements to allow for a HDR Linux desktop ecosystem with this next-generation of displays...

Last month Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame introduced his newest project, casync. The goal of casync is for distributing file-system images and is inspired by rsync and Git...

Intel's Daniel Vetter has sent in a second batch of code updates of new feature work to be staged in DRM-Next for the eventual Linux 4.14 kernel cycle...

Earlier this month the VC5 open-source driver was announced as a new driver for Broadcom's next-generation graphics processor. This has already led to speculation this much more powerful GPU will be found in future Raspberry Pi hardware. Work on this driver has continued while not forgetting about the VC4 driver for current-gen Raspberry Pi devices...

Version 3.2 of the popular Krita digital painting program has a variety of bug-fixes and some new features...

Frequent Phoronix readers may recall that for more than one year a new Linux Random Number Generator has been in-development and today marked the 12th version of these patches being released...

While Intel's Mesa-based open-source OpenGL Linux driver has been officially conformant since early 2017 and has enabled OpenGL 4.5 since last October, the Intel Windows OpenGL driver is finally catching up...

Adding to the list of changes/features you will not find in Linux 4.13 is AMD's Secure Memory Encryption as supported by the new EPYC processors...

Remix OS, the Android-x86 derived operating system for x86/ARM to run Android applications on PCs, is now being discontinued in its current form...

Just ahead of this week's LLVM 5.0 branching, this open-source compiler stack has received completely reworked scheduler information for Intel "Sandy Bridge" CPUs while patches are expected soon for newer generations of CPUs...

KDE's KWin window manager previously made optional use of C++14 when a supported compiler was now available but is now explicitly requiring a C++14 compiler. With this being a core component for the KDE Plasma desktop, hopefully we'll soon be seeing more of KDE make use of more modern C++ features?..

This morning IBM announced the z14 mainframe that is much faster than its predecessors and offers full encryption capabilities...

Linux gamers have frequently complained about the lack of MMORPG games on Linux, but at least today there is now one more with Albion Online beginning to roll out to backers of this medieval fantasy themed game...

With Mesa 17.2 due to be branched by the end of the week and thus place this quarterly update to Mesa under a feature freeze, here are some fresh benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI OpenGL driver on 17.2-dev compared to v17.1.4 stable as well as a few RADV Vulkan benchmarks too.

There are many bug reports out there about issues with Dell's TB15 and TB16 Thunderbolt docks under Linux, but at least some of those remaining issues should be cleared up by a pending fix...

Slackware, the oldest Linux distribution still being maintained, has turned 24 years old...

For those curious about the GCC versus LLVM Clang compilers with Intel's new Core i9 7900X, earlier this month I had ran some compiler benchmarks on this high-end processor...

Given our recent articles of Glibc enabling a per-thread cache for malloc and Fedora 27 will use glibc 2.26, you may be curious about some of the other features coming to this next version of the GNU C Library...

Last week marked the significant Vulkan 1.0.54 update with new extensions and other improvements while coming out today is the much smaller Vulkan 1.0.55 update...

This week I've been working on transitioning my main production workstation to Fedora 26, but I had a really tough time this cycle deciding which graphics card to use, even with having dozens at my disposal...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Friday approved a number of the early change proposals for Fedora 27...

The Mageia Linux distribution derived from Mandriva and its lineage back to Mandrake is now out with their long-awaited Version 6 release...

Herb Sutter has once again provided a nice recap of the latest ISO C++ standards meeting that just wrapped up in Toronto...

With Linux 4.13-rc1 having been released, here's my original look at the new features coming for the Linux 4.13 kernel and the other changes merged over the past two weeks of this new cycle.

Linus Torvalds has announced the end of the Linux 4.13 kernel merge window one day early and with that 4.13-rc1 is now available...

It's fabulous to see how promptly the Mesa Vulkan drivers are receiving support for new extensions...

The Linux 4.13 kernel changes for the UBIFS file-system have been submitted...

KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin has written a blog post explaining the issues they've run into with KDE Plasma on Wayland and how changes to Qt have set them back months in their Wayland session support...

It looks like with the next few generations of Intel processors, they will be coming with more serious graphics upgrades...

FreeBSD 11.1 remains on track for releasing later this month...

The thermal management updates have landed in the Linux 4.13 code-base...

Andres Gomez of Igalia has announced Mesa 17.1.5 as the newest point release to the current Mesa 3D stable series...

Will Cooke of Canonical has posted the latest weekly status update concerning happenings for the desktop on Ubuntu 17.10...

Linux laptop vendor System76 has provided a status update on their activities around their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

With the beta of KDE Applications 17.08 due next week, which is the last cycle where Qt4/kdelibs4-dependent components are still permitted, KDE developer Christoph Feck has generated a list of KDE software not yet ported over to Qt5/KF5...

With the work laid earlier this month by GCC picking up ARMv8-R support, the Cortex-R52 is now supported by mainline GCC as the first ARMv8-R processor...

If you are looking for a low-cost NVMe M.2 SSD, the Toshiba XG3 is moderately priced and offers decent performance under Linux.

Google and Codeplay have developed a new open-source tool for compiling OpenCL C code to Vulkan compute shaders...

The Linux 4.13 merge window is nearing the end and while there is a lot of new features/changes, there is some functionality that you won't find in this next version of the upstream Linux kernel...